Overcoming data island

The creation of several data silos without an idea about a whole picture at a system level is a little evolution compared to the traditional storing system. Today, also in the construction sector, the focus must be directed to the link between data in order to extract from these new values for the entire community. The inherent structure of the construction field characterized by a high fragmentation of subjects involved during the lifecycle of a project needs efficient means to effectively share and manage distributed information. Nowadays great efforts have been spent both in the research and in the industry field in the development of effective means to allow affective collaboration between different disciplines during the entire life cycle of a project. However no steps have been defined in the development of a multi-project paradigm that can give to costumers and in general to the construction industry a valuable instrument for decision making and knowledge sharing processes. In each project we may have different standards, different data fields, different rules of modeling, different codes and it means that elements deriving from different projects cannot be compared to each other. The information fields that are usually used to identify elements in a project environment like names, codes, etc. are useless in a multi-project environment. The objective of this paper is providing a general means to integrate contents derived from different project realities. Our objective is to structure a process that can guarantee good performances and at the same time allows the querying of elements provided by multiple project environments. The conclusions reached are about the identification of a possible path to follow in order to admit the integration of data from different projects and from this, extract new knowledge that today cannot be reached.